Understanding the quirks in state’s college completion rate

Washington’s public four-year colleges have long bragged that their completion rates — that is, the percentage of students who finish their degrees and graduate — are among the best in the nation. And according to a federal postsecondary analysis of data, they are.

But a new study by the respected National Student Clearinghouse, which verifies college degrees to employers and also collects tremendous amounts of data on college completion, appears to show that Washington’s six-year graduation rate for four-year public colleges is not, in fact, the nation’s best — that it’s worse than the national average.

How can that be?

It’s a quirk in the way colleges are classified. In 2007, a few of Washington’s community colleges started offering applied baccalaureate degrees, or four-year degrees. Currently, 11 of the state’s 34 community and technical colleges do so, and more of these degrees are likely to be approved in the future. Some of these colleges have also dropped the word “community” from their names.

So, are they still two-year colleges, or not?

According to the way colleges are classified, they’re now four-year colleges — even though only a fraction of the students they graduate get baccalaureate degrees.

Entities such as the National Student Clearinghouse have begun including the graduation rates for all students at these colleges into the state’s overall graduation rate for four-year schools, said Paul Francis, executive director of the Council of Presidents, which represents the state’s six four-year public schools.

And that’s skewing Washington’s numbers downward, because community colleges tend to have much lower graduation rates than four-year colleges.

“It’s a data issue we face here in Washington — we’re all getting lumped into the same category,” Francis said. Because few community college systems in other states offer baccalaureate degrees, it is not an issue elsewhere.

The National Student Clearinghouse study focused on how students take many different pathways to complete their degrees, with 13 percent of 4-year public college students nationally finishing at a different institution. The study shows 59 percent of students at Washington’s public four-year colleges graduate in six years.

But Francis said Washington’s Statewide Public Four-Year Dashboard, which looks only at the state’s six four-year public universities, shows a six-year graduation rate of 68 percent.

The National Student Clearinghouse report did show one data point that’s not in dispute, and is clearly a strength for the state: Washington’s private non-profit colleges graduated 82 percent of students in six years — one of the highest rates in the country. The national average was 72 percent.

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About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.